It's Criminal And Someone Should Pay

In January, China sentenced two men to death and imposed life in prison on Sanlu Group Co.’s former head for their involvement in the tainted-milk scandal that claimed the lives of at least six babies, Xinhua news agency said. If you recall that incident, at least six babies died, and 294,000 suffered kidney ailments and urinary problems after drinking infant formula tainted with melamine.

In the US, we have had our episode of food poisoning as well. Our culprit, salmonella-laced PEANUT BUTTER! One of my favorite foods (excluding the salmonella)! Now the president of a peanut company and a plant manager are accused of knowingly distributing contaminated food. During a grilling by a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, these men refused to answer many of the questions posed to them. At one point, Rep. Greg Walden, R-Oregon, displayed a container sealed with yellow "caution" tape and said to Stewart Parnell, president of the Peanut Corp. of America, and Sammy Lightsey, manager of the company's Blakely, Georgia plant, "In this container are products that have your ingredients in them, some of which were on the recall list, some of which are probably contaminated....It seems like, from what we've read, you were willing to send out that peanut base [that] went into these ingredients. And I just wonder, would either of you be willing to take the lid off and eat any of these products now, like the people on the panel ahead of you, their relatives, their loved ones did?"

Nine people in the US have died as a direct result of the peanut butter contamination and many others have been sickened. This is criminal and someone should pay, and pay with more than just a monetary fine, which will come out of an insurance company. I am not suggesting these men, if it is they that are guilty, be executed like the case in China, but the guilty in the US peanut butter case are guilty of murder and should be sentenced for such a crime.

“China pays great attention to food safety and product quality,” Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu said at a press briefing today. “In the Sanlu case, China is strictly handling the case according to the law,” she said, adding the country has strengthened its rules and regulations after the scandal. The US should be following the same standards! After all, aren't our standards so much higher than the rest of the world's?